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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> But the quality of the news from these sources makes all corporate news look like complete garbage, because it is

I don't follow all of those, but the ones I have seen a lot from (especially Greenwald and Taibbi) seem to have abandoned even the pretense of doing news for pure commentary, and commentary that is usually pretty predictable in content from just the subject matter and the current alignment of political factions.

I can understand finding them comforting if your ideological biases align with their approach but mistaking them for quality news sources is... surprising.

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> I don't follow all of those, but the ones I have seen a lot from (especially Greenwald and Taibbi) seem to have abandoned even the pretense of doing news for pure commentary, and commentary that is usually pretty predictable in content from just the subject matter and the current alignment of political factions.

The parent post seems to be conflating punditry with news. Ironically, the very issue CNN et al are so incredibly guilty of...

Pundits can be interesting, entertaining, and at times even informative, but using them as a primary source of information seems suspect to me. Their worldviews are (usually, not subtly) skewed towards their ideologies, and they market and sell themselves to people who enjoy confirmation bias.

Parent poster may be a more informed consumer of punditry than most, but regardless this seems like an incredibly poor replacement for factual reporting.

> finding them comforting if your ideological biases align

Actually this group’s political positions are all over the map. The thread that connects them is a lack of influence from DC/Wall St/arms industry. So in other words the comfort is to the extent that I completely distrust those institutions. For someone who does trust those institutions, corporate media is probably fantastic.

> Actually this group’s political positions are all over the map

So?

What I said is I understand finding them comforting if your ideological biases align with their approach, not if you happen to share their exact (especially superficial) ideological position.

> The thread that connects them is a lack of influence from DC/Wall St/arms industry.

That (substantively or superficially) is certainly an angle that can appeal to a particular set of ideological biases, yes.

> What I said is I understand finding them comforting if your ideological biases align with their approach

I apologize for being argumentative, but originally you didn't say "approach" you said "ideological biases" which I interpret on its own as a synonym for political views.

> mistaking them for quality news sources is... surprising

This statement you didn't really support with anything, though of course you're not obligated to. In the absence of that I'm not sure why you would find it surprising that people with Pulitzer prizes for their work in journalism are considered quality sources. I'd be very curious what you consider a quality source to be.

> > What I said is I understand finding them comforting if your ideological biases align with their approach

> I apologize for being argumentative, but originally you didn't say "approach" you said "ideological biases" which I interpret on its own as a synonym for political views.

No, I said both (one referring the the reader and the other to the writer) the first time [0], exactly as I did the second time [1]. “I can understand finding them comforting if your ideological biases align with their approach.”

I can forgive being argumentative, but a selective quote of a partial sentence in one response followed by a straight-out lie about the same material excluded from that quote in the next is... more than just argumentative.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31599240

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31600009

oh, "you can forgive" it? what are you some royal? do you know how dumb and robotic this little "argument" sounds?

For many who are just getting comfortable with the concept of media criticism more broadly, the wordiness and detail of writers like Greenwald and Taibbi can be enchanting, but that's exactly how reactionaries drive engagement -- by seeming like the heady adult in the room, despite their very predictable arguments and abandonment of "journalism" per se, toward "political commentary".

Who is a good independent journalist/blogger? (I'm not even going to ask "who are some" - I'd be happy with just a single person.)

I've also found myself disappointed by those two, even if they're not as bad as CNN/Fox or whatever. They're "independent journalists" as a profession, rather than journalists who happen to be independent.

I think independence can be greatly overrated. Real news requires resources to investigate, gather, corroborate, etc. An truly independent blogger has little ability to do that.

That’s a very condescending position, that only those with a lack of exposure would find these sources compelling because they’ve been hoodwinked by their writing style. You go on to cite Glenn Greenwald as an example of not a real journalist, who has a Pulitzer Prize and founded a gigantic news organization.

Glenn Greenwald doesn’t “seem like” the adult in the room, he is. The corporate media meanwhile almost exclusively provides commentary on stories from news wires, and where they do break stories, have many times turned out to be false, politically motivated, and never retracted.

Chris Hedges spent years of his career in active conflict zones. Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Matt Taibbi — these guys have done tons of original investigative journalism. Your criticism doesn’t land.

> You go on to cite Glenn Greenwald as an example of not a real journalist, who has a Pulitzer Prize and founded a gigantic news organization.

Greenwald clearly was a real journalist, but also fairly overtly quit real journalism specifically over journalistic integrity standards (standards which, even prior to his departure, he had, somewhat unusually, left to others when founding a “gigantic news organization”, fairly overtly because while he at the time recognized their importance to journalism, they were not what interested him about it.)

I would never accuse Greenwald of being incapable of real journalism, only as having, after building a career in it, decided his calling is in building a personal brand in ideological commentary unconstrained by the norms of journalistic integrity.

> unconstrained by the norms of journalistic integrity

I cannot imagine how you arrive at that conclusion.

He sacrificed his position and salary at the organization he founded because he was the one with integrity. He refused to have his anti-Biden article about the Hunter Biden laptop blocked by The Intercept's editor: https://nypost.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-quits-the-inte...

Which the New York Times 17 months later quietly comes out and admits was real https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-... "The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation"

What it sounds like to me -- is that you disagree with Greenwald's political positions so are attacking his integrity with no evidence.

His leaving The Intercept apparently consumed all of his "integrity" stores because he hasn't demonstrated a single bit since that departure, in my measure.

I don't lump Hedges, Blumenthal, or Mate in with Greenwald. Greenwald excised himself from that cohort by turning away from journalism and toward primetime tantrums on Fox News.

Maybe not following news or not caring so much about politics is the right approach?

It is not exactly a conspiracy theory, unfortunately, that "elites" have the last say in political decisions[1]. Having said that and gleaning over past human history, I think the oligarchs or "elites" of our "dynasty" allowed us to enjoy more freedoms than we ever had before.

I also doubt that WarnerMedia or CNN has our best interests when "reporting the news". CNN lives off of sensationalism, and it appears to be a convenient tool for a set of oligarchs to persuade folk over a political topic.

Who are these oligarchs, you say? Rich people who abuse their wealth for lobbying on any matter.

1) https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

The Economist, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair… you were saying?

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